By Trace (Split Feather, Author, Blogger)
I am not an orphan (I had two living parents) but I was adopted out to strangers. I lost my name, ancestry, family ties and medical history. All because of the unregulated adoption industry.
It's that time of year when the US adoption industry pulls out all the stops to boost its profits, making
November "ADOPTION AWARENESS MONTH." They'll tear at your emotions using children they cleverly proclaim to be "orphans!"
Those who read this blog know we call this
Adoption BE-wareness Month.
This is our month to make you aware (via blogs and tweets) that all the devious propaganda out there is nothing more than a sales pitch.
When you think of the profits --- billions of dollars each year --- the adoption industry has to keep potential adoptive parents (PAPS) in the mindset of "saving orphans" or they'll lose their income-stream.
What the adoption industry doesn't want is scrutiny!
They'd like you to believe there are orphans out there waiting to be adopted!
My job is to keep you educated! This month, all month, we are using the hashtag #flipthescript on Twitter! Join me and use the hashtag and share all the posts about the ongoing adoption industry propaganda! We can change the script - we are adoptees and we have a VOICE!
Below is a preview of my latest essay just published in the online magazine,
Gazillion Voices. I
hope readers will find it useful as a way to think about our
responsibility to fix, if not abolish, the broken adoption system.
Here’s the preview:
Another way of putting it is this: There is no
“post-adoption” until we have ended adoption, once and for all. Just as
the boarding school experiment for Native American children has been
discredited as genocidal, just as the Indian Adoption Program has been
disbanded… so too, I anticipate that the transracial and transnational
adoption experiments will be replaced by a much more just and humane
practice that is less about the business of selling children (and in the
process, disrupting extended families of color), and more about
ensuring justice and care for the most needy and vulnerable—namely, poor
women of color and their children around the world…
Child removal: What problem are we solving?
The systematic and widespread removal of Indian children for
placement off the reservations, whether in residential boarding schools
or later, through foster care and adoption by non-Native families, is
shown to be part of a continuum of ongoing strategies to rid settler
nations of their “Indigenous problem.” Interestingly, Canada and
Australia have issued public apologies for their nation’s genocidal
treatment of Indigenous families. The USA has yet to do so.
Much can be learned from the organized resistance, led primarily by
Native American women, which will be of particular interest to activists
working in other struggles facing communities of color. One of the most
inspiring lessons from Jacobs’ book is seeing the ways that
first/birthmothers empowered themselves by blending their roles as
mothers, nurturers, healers, and keepers of the culture with efforts to
become professionals themselves, or by working alongside pro-Indigenous
educators, social workers, and researchers. Not only did they fend off
sexist insults and racist attacks from professionals who degraded Native
women’s ways of knowing and being, they also thwarted assaults from
reform-minded white women whose racist thinking limited their ability to
stand alongside Native women as sister-mothers in solidarity.
Jacobs’s brilliant contribution is towards re-humanizing the victims
and survivors of well-meaning attempts to “rescue” needy children within
a discourse that demonized Native women as unfit, immoral mothers. All
of us touched by adoption would do well to develop a similarly
humanistic view of the first mothers and fathers of adoptees of any
race, and to reject simplistic notions of family dysfunction,
immorality, and parental unfitness when it comes to the family origins
of the adopted individuals we know and love.
Read more>>>
http://gazillionvoices.com/seeking-justice-when-systems-fail-personal-responsibility-in-the-age-of-child-removal/#.VFavixb4KjJ
I'll be back with more this entire month!
NOMINATED: Trio Solutions (Baby Veronica case)
The same professional PR firm that targeted Baby Veronica's father Dusten Brown, pulled out their arrows again and aimed them at yet another father in yet another contested adoption. The exact same tactics (purchasing Facebook likes; setting up an online shop to raise money in a child's name; smearing the father through any means necessary, including nationally-launched press releases; calling in the national press, including CNN; purposely working the public up into an angry lather; having their contractors set up websites to incite anger and hatred of the bio father) were used on John McCaul this year and last. They attempted the same thing with other children's biological families as well, including Baby Dee.
So, I would like to nominate them for their role in meddling in adoption cases and using the weight and cost of an entire Public Relations team to target poorer, less social media savvy birth families.